Key Soviet Figures- Set 1 People

Key figures 1-12

Lavrentiy Beria

Head of Secret Police (NKVD), architect of mass purges, executions, etc.

1938-1953(Stalin’s final years); executed in 1953

Ran Soviet Nuclear weapons program; tried to take power after Stalin’s Death, but Khrushchev and others orchestrated a coup that resulted in his execution. He temporarily led the USSR as one of four deputy prime ministers.

Andrei Gromyko

Soviet Foreign minister

Soviet Ambassador to US, UN Security Council, ambassador to UK

“Mr. Nyet”- rejected many US proposals

Key in arms talk and detente

1957-1985

Vyacheslav Molotov

Stalin’s foreign minister, helped negotiate Nazi-Soviet Pact

Expelled during Khrushchev’s purge of Soviet loyalists.

Andrei Sakharov

Developed Soviet hydrogen bomb

Became a human rights activist in the 1960s

Internal exile under Brezhnev

Won the 1975 Nobel peace prize

Oleg Penkovsky

Soviet military intelligence officer (GRU)

Spy for the West

Arrested and executed in 1963

Oleg Gordievsky

KGB officer who secretly spied for Britain (MI6) in the 1980s

Helped prevent nuclear war in Able Archer 1983

Defected in a dramatic exfiltration

Stanislav Petrov

Soviet Officer who defied protocol when a satellite falsely showed a US strike

Chose not to report it as an attack- avoided nuclear retaliation

“The man who saved the world”

Valentina Tereshkova

Cosmonaut and first women in space

National hero to propaganda symbol to politician

Klaus Fuchs

German-born Soviet spy in US Manhattan Project

Gave USSR atomic secrets

Arrested by UK in 1950

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Soviet author and critic of the USSRs labor camp system

Wrote: The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

US citizens executed in 1953 for passing secrets to the USSR

Their case heightened propaganda and McCarthyism

Aldrich Ames

CIA counterintelligence officer turned Soviet spy

Passed classified info to KGB, exposing 100+ US operations

Arrested by FBI in 1994 and sentenced to life in prison. Received nearly $3 million from the USSR/Russia to reveal the name of all US agents in the Soviet Union

George Blake

British MI6 Agent turned double agent for USSR

Sentenced to 42 years but escaped and fled to Moscow for Soviet protection